Music performance is an intensive sensorimotor task that involves the generation of mental representations of musical information that are actively accessed, maintained, and manipulated according to the demands of the performance. Internal representations and external information interact through feedback and feedforward processes that adjust the…

Previous sport research has demonstrated that athletes of higher levels employ imagery more than low-level athletes. Because there is currently little research on imagery's application in singers, the purpose of the present study was to investigate whether this finding is reflected in low-level and high-level singers. A study-specific…

Music performance requires high levels of motor control. Professional musicians use body movements not only to accomplish and help technical efficiency, but to shape expressive interpretation. Here, we recorded motion and audio data of twenty participants performing four musical fragments varying in the degree of technical difficulty to analyze…

The aim of this study is to compare the activities of Kabalevsky and Bernstein--two musicians who made a significant contribution to the musical education of the younger generation, reveals the principles, methods, forms of educational work and covers the subject of television programmes. In particular, the pedagogical and musical-enlightenment…

Speech is more difficult to understand when it is presented concurrently with a distractor speech stream. One source of this difficulty is that competing speech can act as an attentional lure, requiring listeners to exert attentional control to ensure that attention does not drift away from the target. Stronger attentional control may enable…

This study explored the motivational experiences of nine successful elite performers in ballet, music, and swimming at Norwegian talent development (TD) schools. Semistructured interviews were conducted. Thematic analysis revealed that the performers navigated within and between several contextual layers, characterized by egalitarian values,…

The purpose of this study was to investigate the effects of baton usage on college musicians' perceptions of ensemble performance. Two conductors were videotaped while conducting a 1-minute excerpt from either a technical ("Pathfinder of Panama," John Philip Sousa) or lyrical ("Seal Lullaby," Eric Whitacre) piece of concert…

The music industry is built on a system of expert evaluation focused on sound, but the foundations are challenged by recent research, which suggests that sight trumps sound. This presents a challenge to music educators, who train the next generation of expert performers and listeners. The aim of this study is to investigate students' perceptions…

This paper describes an investigation into the nature of musical intelligence and its links with creativity across two continents, Europe and Africa. In seeking to identify the intellectual processes associated with musical intelligence, improvised music was examined as an example of problem solving in this domain. Twenty-four musicians (twelve…

The New York State School Music Association (NYSSMA) runs an annual evaluation of students' musical performance. The purposes of the evaluation are to promote music programs in the schools and communities of New York State, and to provide a means of objective evaluation of musical performance. The evaluation is influential because the selections…

David Brackett's notion of musical codes, discussed in his book "Interpreting popular music" (2000), offers tertiary music students an opportunity to think about interpretation and performing, about what is conveyed through performing, and connections with extra-musical factors. This article discusses comments made by a class of tertiary…